Saturday 28 November 2009 11.33 EST
First published on Saturday 28 November 2009 11.33 EST

Damon Gough, of the woolly hat and the moody temperament, of the reputation that meanders all over the shop, sometimes ending up in the shop window and sometimes just settling for a while on a dusty shelf at the back, and the look in his eyes that suggests he means business and also a certain amount of mischief, who is known, when and where he is known, to those that know him, but not too closely, as Badly Drawn Boy, appears in the Showing Off... studios one afternoon. He's appeared to chat about what it has meant for a decade or so to be so badly drawn, and to sing a song from his 2000 Mercury Prize winning album The Hour of Bewilderbeast, the kind of scruffily enlightened record that can easily be someone's favourite, and one from what will be his newest album, Is There Nothing We Could Do? (which developed out of the soundtrack to Caroline Aherne and Jeff Pope's new TV film The Fattest Man in Britain). The one, Bewilderbeast, that set him on his way, 30 but boyish, wise and sweetly foolish, and the other, Nothing, that might help him work out where he now is, now that he is well on his way, 40, still boyish, with added wisdom, and still the foolishness, which is a form of playfulness, and yet seriousness, which helps make his songs work when they do and not when they don't.

That's 10 years between one album and the other, and 10 years of his life, which has passed by, he suggests, just like that, even as it has included many many moments of 'just like that', as one moment becomes another, and he ages, and his life changes, but sort of stays the same, and he hangs on to his hat. Albums have been released, projects pursued, concerts given, confessions unravelled, delays enacted, greeted with a mixture of continued, indulgent admiration, a fair amount of indifference and annoyance, and the general sense that he is both well known and sort of forgotten. A gap in the release of recorded music for about three years has, on the quiet, intensified a vague feeling, never quite made concrete, because elsewhere life was racing on and being downloaded left right and centre, that Badly Drawn Boy was becoming a sort of Dunstable-born, Bolton-weaned Orson Welles – gently, woozily spiralling out of control as it became clear than an initial masterpiece was in fact becoming a sort of obstacle as he developed, and lazily, or anxiously, didn't develop, as both a reflective, resourceful, procrastinating artist and an idiosyncratic celebrity.

His songs and music and basically just the way he dresses himself, as though life is one big just-passing-through, leading to all manner of events, non-events, emotions, occasions, wastes of time, triumphs, tragedies, funny moments, lovely moments, indicate that he is not someone who thinks in straight lines, or someone who parcels out his time, which becomes his life, in ways that fit into particular fixed periods. Then again, it is funny, he concedes, that here we are, wondering why on earth we have in general fallen into this pattern of trying to conveniently sum things up by looking back at the previous year, and the previous decade, as if the cascading untidiness and random interconnectedness of life can be somehow controlled by packing it into arbitrary time frames, and he can be so conveniently slotted into the decade. He looks and therefore perhaps thinks, like he might prefer to examine his work and his life (and those of others) in less specific time periods - say, let's look back over the last seven months, or the last four years, or the previous 13 years and five months, to see what patterns develop – but, fair game, he sort of does represent, in his own unrepresentative way, the decade, in a nice ordered way that can take us through what we are now knowing as the noughties. He also has his own experiences with the ups and downs and ins and outs of minor fame – he is discovered, adored, rewarded, and then soon finds himself verging on being discarded as others arrive to challenge his position, seduce his audience and steal his plumped-up slightly ramshackle troubadour throne.

He began the noughties by becoming, in the standard overnight way that didn't really mean it happened overnight, it was just a nice part of the story to explain it that way, a success, as the winsome and winning Badly Drawn Boy, and he ends it, after a decade of dealing with that apparent overnight success, accepting it, fighting it, relishing it, wishing it hadn't happened, chuffed it did, recovering from the shock, as a sort of badly drawn combination of faded hero, self deprecating has-been, obscure serenader, confident, proud artist, puzzled dad, deadpan anecdotalist and battling, noble Chorlton-cum-Springsteen anti-superstar. He hasn't done many interviews recently, so there's a lot of thinking and self-analysing that has welled up, and he takes the opportunity, as musicians have since all this kind of thing began, to treat the interview as a way of working out just what it is he might actually be thinking about who he is and what he is and what the hell it is he does.

Perhaps, after all that, the badly drawn decade that started nowhere and then went somewhere and then threatened to end up nowhere again, has seen Damon Gough move on and arrive back where he started, the overlooked underdog about to make an unlikely move on the ridiculous idea of becoming a champion.